WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM let Bill Murray go home on the range as journalist/wildman/icon Hunter S. Thompson in a 1980 attempt to bottle acid, coke, alcohol and firearms the gifted loon’s essence in a slapdash 1980 comedy set during the early 70’s, “the Age of Nixon.” Bill fans got stoner laughs out of the random mayhem, but critics ripped the flimsy design and shallowness, and peace signs didn’t flash at the box office, nor from the disappointed star or its gonzo hero. *

“I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

John Kaye’s script (with salvage input from Murray and Thompson) pastes elements from “The Banshee Screams For Buffalo Meat”, Hunter’s obituary piece about Chicano lawyer/activist/novelist Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935-1974), who figured in Thompson’s batshit opus “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas”. With Murray, 29, signed up for his second starring role (after Meatballs), and Peter Boyle, billed over him as ‘Carl Lazlo, Esq.’ (i.e. Acosta), it was directed & produced by Art Linson. He had three credits under his belt as a producer but was a freshman director, doing a four-month crash course before cameras rolled. The ‘plot’ covers meetups and road trips between constantly imbibing Hunter and continually scheming Lazlo from ’68 to ’72, including a pot trial travesty in San Francisco, hotel chaos at Superbowl VI in L.A., gun-running for revolutionaries and hassling Nixon during his second Presidential campaign with Hunter, posing as ‘Harris’ to lecture Tricky Dick in a men’s room—

THOMPSON: “Hi sir, it’s Harris from the Post. Can I get you anything sir?”   NIXON: “How’s the family Harris?”   THOMPSON: “Oh the family, well that’s bad news. The screwheads finally came and took my daughter away. Let me ask you a question sir, what is this country doing for the doomed? There are two kinds of people in this country, the doomed and the screwheads. Savage tribal thugs who live off their legal incomes, brow deep out there; no respect for human dignity. They don’t know what you and I understand, you know what I mean.”    NIXON: “You ever play football, Harris?”   THOMPSON: “Yes sir, thank you sir. I played in college, and they’re gonna get your daughter too sir. I’ve heard their rallies, they like Julie but Tricia… and they really hate you sir. You know that one and a half of the State Senate of Utah are screwheads. You know I was never really frightened by the bopheads and the potheads with their silliness never really frightened me either, but these goddam screwheads, they terrify me. And the poor doomed, the young, and the silly, the honest, the weak, the Italians… they’re doomed, they’re lost, they’re helpless, they’re somebody else’s meal, they’re like pigs in the wilderness.”    NIXON: Come here Harris, come here. Fuck the doomed!    That’s our Dick.

Despite reservations about how the script and piloting were mis-shaping up, Murray had a whale of a time shacking with Thompson for months, morphing up so much of HST’s aura that it stuck with him for a good while after, enough to irritate cast members on Saturday Night Live when he returned to the fold. He does a good enough job impersonating Thompson’s mannerisms, carriage and speaking style, and Boyle looks to be having fun indulging in nuttiness as the ever-weirdening partner in rebellion. Some of the absurdist activity is amusing, but an equal amount falls flat, and it ultimately comes off as an exercise in extended skits. To quote Gene Siskel, “Murray is fine at playing an angry clown, but Where the Buffalo Roam should have given us much more than that. There’s nothing in the film that would make anyone want to read Hunter Thompson’s words. And that’s a critical failure for a movie about a writer.”

“Like a lot of people thought I was dead but, uh… hey you know you don’t write any postcards when you’re on the road to self-discovery.”

Cogerson places it 75th in’80, grossing $9,800,000, while Box Office MoJo lists $6,659,000. Murray’s other anarchic outing that year, Caddyshack, was a big hit.

Neil Young did the scoring and sings a plaintive version of the title ballad. With Bruno Kirby (disguised version of Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner), R.G. Armstrong, Craig T. Nelson (funny bit as a flustered cop), René Auberjonois, Mark Metcalf, Danny Goldman, Rafael Campos (bananas as ever), Otis Day, Sunny Johnson, Leonard Frey, Jerry Maren, Cork Hubbert and Inga Neilson. 99 minutes.

* Murray: “It had a first-time director— first and last time director. And he didn’t particularly know what he was doing and he thought cocaine was the way to solve scenes. So that didn’t work out particularly well.” “I rented a house in L.A. with a guest house that Hunter lived in. I’d work all day and stay up all night with him; I was strong in those days. I took on another persona and that was tough to shake. I still have Hunter in me”.

Thompson, go figure, hated it as “a horrible pile of crap. Murray did a good job. But it was a bad script. You can’t beat a bad script. It was just a horrible movie. A cartoon. But Bill Murray did a good job. We actually wrote and shot several different endings and beginnings and they all got cut out in the end. It was disappointing.”

While this bombed out and his only other directorial effort The Wild Life wasn’t much to brag about, to his credit Art Linson had great success as a producer: Car Wash, Melvin And Howard, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, The Untouchables, Heat, Fight Club, Into The Wild, The Runaways.

Thompson Estrangement Syndrome would twice inhabit Johnny Depp, in 1998’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, which certainly got the ‘trip’ vibe down and thirteen years later in the enjoyable, unheralded The Rum Diary.